Planning for the remaining Spring meetings: Daisy Lemus and Larry Becker are coming to our next meeting to talk about their reworked “memo for chairs.” Penny Jennings will also be coming in during our April meeting. There was a discussion about holding the May meeting off campus in the first two weeks of May.

There was a discussion of members who will be rotating off the committee (Sheena and Ali). There was also a discussion about electing the next Chair of the Council of Chairs. This agenda item was tabled until next meeting.

10:30 a.m. time certain: Elizabeth Adams visited the Council of Chairs and provided information on many topics. The main issues she covered were:

Graduating Seniors – need to have a 2.0 GPA in the Upper Division of the major in order to graduate, as well as 2.0 in any minor students have.

The only way for students who don’t meet this requirement to graduate would be to petition the Chair of the major or minor department/program. The Chair can then consider what courses to count for the student to graduate.

Chairs can always go to Elizabeth Adams or Shelly Thompson for advice about how to help a student who has such an issue.

Academic Renewal – can only be applied for a student who needs this clause to graduate. Student may petition to have upto 2 semesters of college work discounted from consideration if they have returned after a gap of 5 years.

Adams stated that she could only know about problems with Grad checks if Chairs contact her and let her know about any practices that are out of the ordinary. She encouraged Chairs to do so.

Advisor Trac: it is now operational in Student Service Center EOP satellites, LS, ARC, Atheletics Adivising.

It is an online program which draws on PeopleSoft Data. It allows students to make advising appointment, they get reminders, and they can cancel appointments in some cases.

It allows advisors to take notes about the students, and share those notes with other advisors. Many advisors find this feature useful.

It gives Undergraduate Studies an overview of advising appointments, extract statistics. The program is helpful for students who are in trouble, and for students who are being re-directed from one major to another.

This Spring, Deaf Studies and Child and Adolescent Development are piloting it. It will be available to other departments in the future. Shelly Thompson is the person in charge of Advisor Trac. Adams said it has been a very successful.

iPad initiative: it will be probably called My CSUN Tablet. There are currently a small group of faculty across different colleges who are being trained right now on how to embed the use of iPads/tablets into the classroom and beyond. Students can buy them through financial aid. To make it break even for students they have to have at least 3-4 classes that use it over their time at CSUN. There are departments within the following colleges that are working on this initiative: HHD, AMC, ECS, COBE, S&M and the ITEP Program in Humanities. There will be a group of departments that will be the next round of this initiative. Herman volunteered to have the Introduction to Sociology course be part of it.

SB 520. Bill by Senator Steinberg. The bill tries to oblige campuses in the UC, CSU and Community Colleges to accept MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Part of the idea is to reduce time to degree. We don’t know where it’s going at this time. Has not yet been passed by the Senate. If it passes, then CSUN will have to figure out how to work with it. It might possibly be like the CLEP (College Level Examination Program) test, which CSUN currently accepts.

SB 1440 is already law. It is the STAR Act, or the Degree with the Guarantee. If a student does a TMC (Transfer Model Curriculum) at a Community College, and gets an AA, we have to guarantee that they will get the matching Bachelor’s degree in 60 units. CSUN has by and large said yes to most of the TMC’s. There are a few majors/TMC’s we have not articulated. However, Alex Padilla and the Vice Chancellor have started paying attention to large majors where we have not accepted a TMC and will be encouraging those to consider it.

Compass Project & GE Paths: Compass is a statewide project – to help students advance through the degree more quickly. CSU is working with Community Colleges to get more connection between the two systems, to get more students into the pipeline to graduate in a timely manner.

CSUN has a Compass Project in Sociology where the Sociology Department is working with community colleges

In the GE Paths Projects – CSUN has taken extant connections in GE, and made those connections for students. Students chose a “theme” such as Social Justice, or Global Studies, or Arts, Media and Society. We are partnering with Pierce.

There was a discussion of topics for Deans and Chairs Retreat for the Fall. There were two “sessions” that came from the council of chairs last year. Shari encouraged us to bring in topics for next meeting. The meeting adjourned at 11:45 a.m.